


Sam

by JaseyRae1982



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:08:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25115923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaseyRae1982/pseuds/JaseyRae1982
Summary: Again, I'm still bored in lockdown and posting the things I have written on my laptop. This one hurt a bit to write but here it is x
Kudos: 1





	Sam

I think I had always known Sam. Even though we met at school, I cannot remember a time when I didn't know him, therefore in my childlike brain, he had always existed in my atmosphere. Growing up together in a small town, we had earned a reputation at a young age for being troublemakers, though often through no intent from our part. I remember when he turned 8, and I only a few weeks behind, Sam's grandparents gifted a bow and arrow to him. By the time my birthday had come around, the arrows were to be confiscated from us, ‘they’re too dangerous’, and ‘you'll hurt yourselves’... ‘can't imagine what your grandfather was thinking, giving a weapon to an eight year old.’ We decided after a week or so of further playing with the bow that it wasn't anywhere near as fun when you didn't have something to fire across the garden. I’ll save you the time and cut short this anecdote, so we were both grounded for shooting a bamboo stick, with a nail glued to the end, through the fence and then through the window of Mr Bailey's car. I can't explain in 26 letters or a few thousand words what this friendship meant to me then, nor what it means now. Because even through our adventures, like when we found a dinosaur bone on a pebble beach and we made it into the newspaper; or in our downfalls, such as the news that we couldn't go on to secondary school together, he always just existed, and I appreciated that.   
He existed. Past tense. Sam’s last few days, I'd like to think, were some of our best together. As teenagers, we had picked up, like many kids in our town, the usual habits, and used to spend our weekends driving like maniacs through deserted car parks, spend our evenings drinking and laughing with friends and spend our nights smoking and talking under the stars. On one particular night, a mutual friend had thrown a huge party when his parents went away, and there must have been 200 people in that house that night, all underage, and all inebriated. No one knew that it wasn't going to end the same as any other party, half dressed in bed with some person you had only met hours ago, but, for me at least, in a waiting room, in a hospital. The party was in full swing, loud drum and bass could be heard three doors down, and there was a loud, drunk teenager covering almost every surface in the house. Sam had a habit for drinking cider, and preferred it over any other drink. He also had a habit for a social spliff a few drinks in. Although I didn't share this interest with him anymore, I had served my fair time in doing the same. It only took one person to show up that night to ruin everything, a friend of a friend, he went to school with someone’s brother, he did lifts for someone else. No one really knew him directly. He was never seen in full view. He came in an expensive car, with some friends and was doing the rounds at the party, selling little baggies. At some point, he must have made enough business to call it a night and left. I never saw him leave. I don't know how, I don't know why, because Sam had never, to the best of my knowledge, been interested in harder drugs, but clearly some of the contents of those hateful little baggies had wormed their way inside him. I lost my best friend. I lost my best friend because a drug that was fairly common where I grew up had been cut with crushed glass. When the ambulance came, I was allowed to ride with him, I watched him cough up blood, my best friend. I sat in the hospital waiting room, hearing him retch and cough, over and over. My best friend. I was there when his father pulled me aside and told me that he wasn't here anymore. My best friend. My brother picked me up from the hospital and I was silent on the drive home, the whole hour. I could only hear one thought in my mind. How do I live without my best friend? I have always hated the sentiment of ‘it gets better’ and I still do, don't worry, and although for some people, things do, mine didn't. It got easier, yes, but not better. It's still just as hard to think of that one night that cost me my best friend, even five years later. I miss my best friend. I think from time to time I see him, standing behind one of my brothers at a family funeral, raising a glass at my sisters wedding, or just a stranger in an airport. That, in a way, is comforting, and I know I'll see him again, another time. I miss my best friend. I miss my brother.


End file.
